


Kill for This

by Cecil



Category: Naruto
Genre: Itachi Deserved Better, Kid Fic, Kid Uchiha Itachi, Kid Uchiha Sasuke, No You Won't, Uchiha Itachi Being a Good Brother, Uchiha Itachi-centric, You Will Pry Best Boy Itachi From My Skeletal Phalanges, actually, and Evolutionarily Advantageous Opposable Thumbs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-07
Updated: 2011-04-07
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:08:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22928482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cecil/pseuds/Cecil
Summary: Obito washes the blood out of his clothes before he comes to pick up his baby cousin, and this is just one reason he is Itachi's idol.
Relationships: Uchiha Itachi & Uchiha Obito, Uchiha Itachi & Uchiha Sasuke, Uchiha Itachi & Uchiha Shisui
Comments: 1
Kudos: 55





	1. Keeping it all going (Around Us)

**Author's Note:**

> It turns out I still like this piece. 
> 
> Let it be known that there was never a single moment in which I doubted Itachi. As one of my friends would say, it is my firm and unwavering belief that canon "did Itachi fucking dirty".
> 
> *quick writes Itachi fix-it while Kishi isn't looking*

Itachi is late.

The world is on fire, the sky and streets and everything in between a warm, insistent orange that drives the shadows between the buildings and beneath the raised walkways in thin, tangled lines to the edge of the world by the time Obito shows up, soft soles scuffed against the pavement and the rattle of the chain link fence.

Obito comes to the gate. He stops and waves. He props his elbows between the bars of the fence and says, “Hey, Ta-kun!”

Obito is smiling.

Itachi doesn’t smile or wave back. Itachi looks up at his cousin. Itachi is tired from waiting and hungry because it’s only ten minutes until his regular dinner time, but Itachi doesn’t say any of this to his cousin.

Sometimes Obito leaves the country because there’s a war, but usually Obito doesn’t because he’s just a genin. Days Obito can make it back, Obito is supposed to walk Itachi home from day school.

Obito says, “Sorry.”

Itachi is sitting on a bench on the line between the school’s front-walk and the playground. Hands flat beside his thighs, every finger stretched over a gap in the green lattice work. The metal is hot against the back of his legs through his blue linen pants, especially in the crease of his knees. His feet hang half a foot from the asphalt below. His school bag sits beside him.

“I know,” Obito swings the gate open, “I know, I’m late. But I was on my way here from Sarutobi-sama’s office and this black cat crossed my path.”

Obito walks up to Itachi and lifts him up and down. He pulls the straps of Itachi’s backpack over Itachi’s shoulders and kneels to fasten them across his chest. The whole time, he’s saying how he had to take the long way around downtown, and how the black cat followed him anyway because she had lost her owner.

“And you know where her owner was?”

Itachi shakes his head no.

“The hospital.”

This is the part where Obito is supposed to take Itachi’s hand and walk quickly and safely back to the family compound like his mother –Itachi’s and Obito’s both—told him to.

What Obito actually does is turn his back and lace his fingers together, and Itachi steps up and onto Obito’s back, practiced and obedient. Itachi winds his arms around Obito’s neck, fragile line of his cousin’s throat pressed under the early weight of his limbs. Obito’s jacket against Itachi’s chest is damp.

Obito chirps, “She was really cute, too. The girl, I mean. Ready?”

Itachi nods.

Obito crosses his arms under Itachi’s legs and the box lunch Itachi ate lunch from pressed sharp against the blue canvas of Itachi’s bag. Obito says, “She’s training to be a medic-nin, which is good. We’ve got lots of soldiers—”

 _children_ , Itachi remembers Obito saying, before, then Obito turns down a wide street with the academy just ahead and Itachi thinks about that instead.

“But no one to take care of them.”

Itachi lifts his head up beside his cousin’s to stare at the country emblem on the academy roof. His hair slides along Obito’s jaw and the bandage plastered behind Obito’s ear.

Obito follows the movement. He says, “Only a few more years, Ta-kun. You’ll be there before you know it.”

Itachi doesn’t agree. He doesn’t disagree, either, though, so Obito counts it as a victory and launches into an overtly biased retelling of his latest mission: _So, yeah, Kakashi saved the day, but I totally saved his ass like, three times. And Ren smiled at me._

Itachi asks, “You’re not a very good ninja, are you?”

Obito pauses mid-triumph. “Huh?”

“Are you?” Itachi repeats. His hold around Obito’s neck tightens just a little.

“Well,” Obito speaks easily, confidently, “that depends.”

“On?”

“On what your idea of a good ninja is!”

His chin pressed into Obito’s shoulder, Itachi’s eyebrows draw down. “A good ninja is a good ninja. There’s no two ways about it.”

Obito says, “There’s always another way,” and Itachi figures Obito can’t see his scowl over his shoulder, but it’s there and Obito _knows_.

Eventually, inevitably, Itachi has to ask: “What’s your idea?”

They’re almost to the gates of the compound. The stream that runs to the lake at the edge of the compound is quiet and slow with sunset gilded ripples beside the path.

“Look—”

Obito stops and kneels. Itachi slides off Obito’s back, his sandals in the fine gravel, and Obito turns to face him.

“—close your eyes for a moment?”

Itachi closes his eyes.

“My idea is one day you’ll become a skilled ninja. You’ll be strong, and quick on your feet, and handsome, too.”

“Like my dad?” Itachi asks. There’s the sound of rustling cloth and Itachi thinks maybe Obito moves closer.

“Better. Everyone will admire your skill. Your name will be known all over the world. And despite it all, you’ll be a good ninja.”

Something warm and soft touches Itachi’s forehead. At first, Itachi think it’s Obito’s lips, a kiss, but it doesn’t leave. So Itachi raises his hand and searches with his fingers and hits warm steel.

He opens his eyes.

Obito is leaning over him, arms stretched behind Itachi’s head to tie the headband in place. When he’s done, soft cloth pressed under and over Itachi’s hair in an unfamiliar way, Obito rocks back on his heels and looks at him. The path around them at dusk and the lull between children rushing home and adults rushing to work is silently still, and Itachi stands attentively still but eventually he says, “Ok.”

Itachi traces the etched spiral on the metal plate of the headband with his fingers.

“Ok,” Obito repeats. He turns his back to Itachi again, and Itachi climbs back up.

Obito fills the last few minutes of the walk home talking while Itachi puts his head down and dozes off. The stretch of skin between Obito’s collar and jaw smells like new dirt and the trees in summer and the soap his own mother uses on the clothes, sometimes. Itachi leans close and kisses his cousin’s neck, the tiny blue thread stitches laced through his skin. He doesn’t remember getting home.

  
  


.x.

  
  


“You’re leaving again.”

Obito opens his eyes. Itachi is watching him from around the edge of the rock, upside down. Frowns still look like frowns even when you look at them upside down, Itachi has discovered. There’s no way Obito thinks he’s smiling.

Chest heaving and sprawled in a rather undignified manner, Obito only manages to reply with a breathy, “Oh…yeah.”

Itachi is behind a rock on the training grounds. He’s been sitting on the target painted on the other side all morning long.

“Itachi.” Obito seems to realize his gaze is drifting off with a lazy white cloud, so he sets his attention on a distant tree-top and the red-and-white target in its branches instead.

 _Still not_ _**me** _ _,_ Itachi thinks.

There’s a kunai set just in the edge of the target Obito’s looking at. Obito says, “It’s my job, Itachi.”

Itachi comes close, so he’s comfortably back in Obito’s field of vision.

Obito snickers a little. “Look at you,” he says, “with your _shirt,_ ” it’s just a clan shirt, “ and your _scowl,_ ” his _what?,_ “and your hair –“

Itachi’s hair is dark, just like Obito’s. Just like his father’s, and his mother’s, and most of the rest of the clan. He looks the way he always does. The only thing even slightly out of the ordinary is that he’s holding one of Obito’s kunai. Obito usually doesn’t let him do that.

“You didn’t say you were,” Itachi says, the point he’d been trying to make.

Obito sighs dramatically. “I don’t even like Kakashi. You think I’m looking forward to a month with him?”

“I don’t care,” Itachi replies immediately, then snaps his mouth closed. He blinks, hands fumbling the kunai into a more appropriate hold.

“You should stay in his favor,” Itachi lectures his cousin. His attention is on the kunai, though. It’s hard to hold it the right way when its handle is still slightly too big for his hand. “He’s strong. Smart. Valuable.”

“A jerk.” Obito pouts up at Itachi, looking utterly affronted, tells him, “You sound like your father.”

Itachi’s attention shifts to Obito. Itachi doesn’t say anything. Obito hasn’t asked for his kunai back, so Itachi hasn’t offered it. Maybe he won’t ask for it back at all.

It would be nice if Obito would sit up, though. He waits, and finally Obito does. His legs stretch out before him.

“It’s not forever,” Obito promises.

“I’m not going to live forever,” Itachi informs him. He’s 5 (almost), not stupid. Obviously, nothing is forever. Everyone dies. Everything dies.

Obito smiles stretches out across his face, quick and wide. He reaches out and lays his hand on Itachi’s head. He says, “Good ninja never die.”

 _This_ again. Itachi reminds him, “You’re not that good.”

.x.

“Our condolences,” Fugaku and Mikoto harmonize, bowing low before Obito’s parents.

Itachi doesn’t bow, which everyone ignores, maybe because he is shorter than his parents’ humility, but he is the one holding their money envelope so they can’t ignore him all together. He meets his aunt and uncle’s eyes as he hands the folded cream envelope to them. On the front, it says how much money’s inside. Itachi doesn’t know how much there is. He can’t read yet.

Two long hours after his family arrived at the Uchiha compound’s main shrine, Itachi has tired of his family’s call and response, the same conversation again and again from every corner, between every group of people who make eye contact. At the first lapse in their attention, he sneaks off to the garden.

The maze hedges tower over him, dark green walls laced with purple and red petals that block half the sky. Itachi is wearing his formal kimono, with the family mon on his breast in identification just in case Itachi ever gets lost and there is any question as to his name, where he should be returned to. The kimono has large sleeves he associates mostly with Mother at festivals and civilian celebration, dango and rare breezes in the summer closer to his skin than t-shirts. It’s not his first time in a kimono, and Father’s instruction had been precise, so even though it’s cumbersome, he doesn’t trip over the hem.

Standing under a tree in the heart of the hedge maze is Kakashi. He looks up as Itachi approaches.

Everything from Kakashi’s nose down is concealed by a navy mask. His only visible eye is a hard, pale grey. The other is beneath the starched white bandages that wrap around his head at an awkward tilt.

Itachi doesn’t know, yet, what’s under the bandages.

Kakashi doesn’t say a word, so Itachi likewise remains silent.

The noises of the shrine carry over the garden, but neither pays much attention. Finally Kakashi moves, shifting in place, and snorts.

“You’re not even mourning him,” Kakashi says and Itachi staring up, up, up Kakashi’s pants and collared shirt to Kakashi’s head tilted against the tree branches and the blue sky, only that thin triangle of all Kakashi’s face visible, Itachi is surprised by Kakashi’s voice. Kakashi’s voice is young and high and feels like sharp ice all the way down his spine.

Itachi steels himself and says, “There’s no body.”

Kakashi cants his head down, watching Itachi through the dressings that have taken over his head. “What?”

“There’s no body. There’s a funeral, and there’s a grave, but there’s no body.” Itachi feeling a lot smaller under Kakashi’s figure, dressed in shinobi black and more black and navy and that smudge of white bandages, standing over him with the red and white flush of the tree’s canopy spreading out behind, Itachi tells his counsin’s teammate, “I will not mourn him.”

Kakashi doesn’t blink. Kakashi seems like he’s forgotten Itachi is even there. Except Kakashi reaches out faster than Itachi can follow, pulling his hands from his pockets to grab both of Itachi’s hands in one of his own.

“Generally,” Kakashi is saying, forcing Itachi’s hands together and palms up, “when someone dies, he is mourned with an intensity directly proportionate to the intensity with which he was detested in life.”

Kakashi shoves several slips of paper money into Itachi’s hand. He curls Itachi’s hand around the crisp folds of bright paper. He glances at Itachi, briefly.

He says, “I mean, the people who will cry the hardest probably hated him the most.”

Kakashi bows down to Itachi’s height, drops his gaze to the ground under Itachi’s geta. Kakashi says, “My condolences,” in a heavy, hollow voice, then he straightens and walks away.

Itachi doesn’t see any more reason _he_ should stick around. Careful, both hands still palms up before him, Itachi walks back through the maze and returns to the shrine.

Nothing has changed.

Itachi goes close to the altar, with the heavy incense spilling choking grey fog in the summer air just over his head, and finds Shisui kneeling there, close to the dry wood as he’d expected.

“Shisui,” Itachi calls, ducking into Shisui’s space. Other relatives are around, but far away. The little parts of Shisui’s name slides back and forth between Itachi’s milk teeth.

He calls again, “Shisui,” and Shisui slowly, slowly turns. On his knees, with his back curved, his head comes to the same height as Itachi’s. “Give me your hands,” Itachi tells Shisui.

Shisui holds outs his hands quietly, and Itachi corrects, “No, hold them open, I’m going to give you something.”

Shisui’s fingers curl back from his palms.

“You’re going to drop it,” Itachi declares, frowning at the loose bowl Shisui has made of his hands.

Shisui finally speaks, but his voice sounds wrong. Cracked and dry, like the incense. “What?”

Itachi lifts the small fortune closer to Shisui’s eyes.

Shisui licks his lips. “What?” he repeats. But he extracts a twisted bill from Itachi’s collection.

Blank before, Shisui’s face turns down everywhere, eyebrows and lips especially. He lifts the bill as Itachi did, closer to the altar. He holds it to the incense, the point of contact between the burning ash and the paper glowing orange, and then the bill falls apart, breaking into little pieces from the tip of the incense down to Shisui’s fingers. Its many pieces flutter to the ground.

Itachi watches and doesn’t say anything. Shisui’s expression is surrounded by the smoke.

“Give me the rest,” Shisui orders. Itachi hands it to him. Shisui drops it all on the ground, then organizes it by color, presses out the folded in lines and folds in his own until they all lie nestled inside each other. Shisui wraps his free hands around the back of Itachi’s neck, strokes the line of his heartbeat.

“Who?” Shisui asks.

Itachi answers, “Kakashi.”

Shisui snorts. “And that’s all he gave you?”

.x.

Obito was wrong. Itachi enters the academy before the vigil at Obito’s grave is over. The war pushes on beyond the walls of Konoha, but inside is safe for the lesser war preparations. The Uchiha are busy dressing in their mourning clothes and not talking about what happened.

Who will actually take Itachi to school is not discussed.

The morning of Itachi’s first day at the academy, his mother sits beside him at the table, patting his hair as he pokes and prods at the breakfast she made. Five minutes after he was supposed to have left if he wants to arrive on time, she hands him his backpack. When he takes it, there’s the sound of metal sliding against metal.

Kakashi waits for him on the other side of the front door that first morning, and again at the end of the day at the academy. Kakashi doesn’t say anything to Itachi while they walk. He holds his head down toward the ground as they thread through the morning and afternoon crowds, maybe to ensure he matches Itachi’s pace exactly two step ahead of him. Maybe so he doesn’t have to look at Itachi. Kakashi’s hands sway by his side, curled around the air as if it held weapons.

Kakashi is there again the next day, and the day after that, and the week after that, though by the end of the first month he only appears at the academy to walk Itachi home. By the second month, he is consistently fifteen minutes late. Itachi waits for him in the shade under the tree across the street from the academy’s front door.

Fifteen minutes become twenty-five, and then forty, but that is nothing compared to the weeks Itachi has waited for the image of Obito’s smiling face on the back of his eyelids at night to vanish the way his name had already gone at home.

“Itachi-kun,” Kakashi calls in greeting when he finally melts out of thin air right beside Itachi in the tree’s shadow. His headband lately has been falling further down the white line of bandages over his eye even though the bandages themseles have been growing smaller.

Itachi wonders if Kakashi is getting sloppier because he is sad, because if he is, then he’s stupid and will probably die next. Sloppy ninja get killed. Itachi’s teacher had said so the first day of class and then made everyone reorganize their school things, but Itachi had already known that.

Kakashi holds out his hand to help Itachi up from the ground. “Sorry I’m late,” Kakashi tells him, visible eyebrow lifting slightly in shame. “I was held up.”

Itachi takes his hand. It’s the last day of class before summer break. He doesn’t see the point in telling Kakashi he doesn’t want him walking him home anymore.

“You know,” Kakashi begins, lightly, “I thought making jounin would be the end of pointless grunt work. Er,” Kakashi turns and tilts his head down to Itachi, “you know what grunt work is?”

“Yes.”

Kakashi sighs somewhat dramatically. “Well. But I guess you don’t want to hear about that.”

Itachi shakes his head ‘no.’

“So?” Kakashi prompts.

Itachi’s fingers tighten around Kakashi’s hand. “What happened to –” Obito “—your eye?”

Kakashi drops Itachi’s hand so he can unwind the bandages. Then he shows him.

.x.

Shisui is not Obito, but neither is Itachi.

The first three months after Obito’s funeral, Itachi sees Shisui only once when he and his mother visit for tea.

Itachi and his mother visit Shisui’s family toward the begininng of Itachi’s summer break. Shisui’s mother and father sit at one edge of the table and Itachi’s mother sits across from them, so Shisui and Itachi sit across from each other. Itachi wishes it were winter, so he could stick his legs under the table and touch Shisui and no one would see, but the more he thinks about it, the less he’s sure he wouldn’t press his feet to the heater instead, or that he could even reach the other side. So Itachi keeps his legs folded under himself. He wraps his hands around his mug, and drinks the tea he doesn’t like. Itachi tries not to stare at Shisui staring at the table with eyes that are red in a way that’s not Sharingan.

Shisui’s mother murmurs about how big Itachi is getting, how he’ll be able to enter the academy soon. Shisui tells her that Itachi already has.

When they leave Shisui offers Itachi’s mother a hand up from the low table. Itachi’s mom takes Shisui’s hand around the space of her round belly, even though Itachi still sees her get up on her own at home.

.x.

Five days later, Itachi’s mother goes to the hospital to have the baby.

His father takes him to visit.

“Would you like to say hello to your brother?” Itachi’s mother asks when his father leads him into her room.

Itachi’s mother looks the way she always does, only dressed in hospital blues. She smiles when she sees Itachi. Itachi follows her beckoning wave and goes up to the bed. The bed is very tall, so his father lifts him up onto the mattress.

Itachi’s baby brother is half asleep, scrunched inside red and white blanks on his mother’s lap. Itachi reach out to pet, gently, and his fingers sink down in the soft pile for a long time before meeting resistance.

“He doesn’t have a name, yet,” Itachi’s mother tells him softly. She strokes Itachi’s hair with her free hand and leans close. “He needs a good one.”

“Itachi,” he volunteers. He can vouch for it.

His mother laughs. The baby opens and closes his mouth a few times, like he’s trying to join in, too.

“We already gave the one to you,” Itachi’s mother says, and her voice is scratchy.

Itachi’s father mutters something about water and leaves the room.

Itachi’s mother pulls his hair behind his ears. She tells him, “Itachi-chan, he will help you.”

The baby closes his eyes and sticks out his tongue.

“He’ll help you be strong and brave. He will make you great,” she promises.

Itachi puts his hand on the baby’s head. He has a lot of hair. It’s soft.

Itachi’s mother tempers him, “But not yet. You have to help him first. You have to make him great first. That’s what brothers do.”

This is what his mother expects of him. Everyone expects a lot of things from Itachi, actually, often things they never expect from anyone else, but this is the first he’s been asked that he’s sure he can’t do. Not yet. Yes, he’s growing (slowly), but Shisui’s already one of the greatest ninja in the village, and Obito had still died, and Itachi—he still needs both hands to hold a kunai. His hand isn’t big enough to support half his brother’s head, and isn’t he going to be growing, too?

The only advantage Itachi can see that he has is five years to Shisui’s one.

Itachi repeats his mother’s words, not quite believing. “He’s going to help me?”

His mother kisses the edge of his hair, just in front of his ear. “He will, Itachi.”

Itachi curls the hand his still has down in the blanket, holding on, and says, “His name is Sasuke.”

  
  


.x.

In an underground cavern at the end of a system of mountain corridors, behind the Hokage faces on the edge of the village not pressed against burning, bleeding forest, Itachi presses his baby brother further into his chest and wonders what’s going on.

Not out there—he knows what’s out there.

Out there is a divine monster, teeth and claws and blood red that stains the sky and the trees and the ground and Itachi’s eyes.

Not that Itachi can see this.

(It’s one of the few things he can’t.)

One of the adults herding the group crouched piss-scared and trembling kneels before Itachi. “Are you alright?” she asks.

Itachi is eye-level with her chest. He can see the stretch of her words in her throat.

“Itachi-kun?” She reaches out to him.

Itachi flinches backwards, away from the rush of blood up each finger and the slow squeeze back down. Itachi is thinking about the well of red down a kunai when Obito was clumsy, thin and fast like water from a faucet, only now Itachi knows it’s not like that at all, it is a crawl-pause-climb under the skin, people who die bleeding out die _slow_.

Sasuke’s eyelashes flutter in his sleep. It’s very pretty. Like a leaf fan on a hot day. Gentle press of the air, and his baby brother inhales, deep. Exhales. Deep in sleep, Sasuke breathes slow and even the way Itachi recognizes he isn’t, so he stops.

To his left, an old man does the same.

The woman kneeling in front of Itachi, one of the stretched beats in her throat falls out of the pattern. Her shoulder tense in. Her eyes with the pupils blown near all the way through the brown iris, her eyes jump right, only Itachi’s not sure if he just imagined that, she’s staring so intently.

She says, “If you need any help, Itachi-kun—”

She leaves.

Itachi is the baby of the clan after Sasuke, then Obito, then Shisui; and Shisui is fifteen, and a good ninja, and out in the forest right now with his parents and Itachi’s parents and Itachi’s aunt and uncles and the cousins who run the police station and who are ANBU. Itachi knows all of their names and all of their faces. Doesn’t _know_ most of them, but he wishes one of them were here.

Inside the caverns isn’t quiet. The women and men pulled tight into themselves or spread thin over wailing children, they aren’t shinobi. They waste movement, trying to find a place to settle. Staring at the walls. Trembling.

Half of them are looking the wrong direction if they’re looking for the monster outside, even the academy kids.

Sasuke sleeps on. Outside, it had been dark and loud. Itachi had still been asleep until his father set him on his feet before a stocky genin patting shaky shoulders and nudging a line up the slope into the mountain. The whole time, this genin telling civilians don’t panic but move quickly, he’s breathing too hard and too quick. Itachi’s father gave the boy a disapproving look as he’d bundled Itachi’s jacket over Itachi’s pajamas and did the buttons.

The genin straightened his posture.

Itachi’s mother kissed his forehead. She pressed his brother into Itachi’s arms by way of blankets in a sling she passesd over his head. The blankets are red with white lattice windmills, like Itachi’s pajamas.

They’d pushed him away after the line, then they’d disappeared. Right under the Hokage heads, the evacuation path had led back out along the cliff face. Itachi shouldn’t have, should have been watching where he was going, paying attention to his feet like the genin kept reminding everyone, but Itachi had looked up. He’d looked out across the village roofs. And Itachi had seen the end of the world.

The people around Itachi are screaming. He knows it’s the people around him and not the people outside because the sound is all fear and no pain, and anyway they’re too far back in the mountains. Supposed to be, he thinks, as the cavern splits around a howl and the people around Itachi go silent.

Everywhere Itachi looks are broken hearts, too slow or too fast or too many to one person, or pulsing in the wrong place.

The walls ripple. He’s not imagining it this time, he knows, because the other people shake and jerk away. Their eyes roll, searching for the invading, repulsive energy, but they’re all looking in the wrong direction again. Itachi watches a jerking domino of movement cascade from shoulder to biceps to wrist to finger in forty-seven variations until he feels sick.

Meanwhile, the energy ripples continue to move in waves of dizzy heat. Maybe they would scare Itachi, too, if he couldn’t see it. But he can see it. So instead, Itachi just feels light-headed and a little sweaty and a lot like throwing-up. Itachi closes his eyes and pushes his chin into his chest and whimpers, high and long.

Finally, the sound stops. Everything is quiet, but a suffocating quiet, so silent Itachi can’t hear his own life bumping through him. The waves of energy keep going.

Sasuke stirs in his arms. He bumps one little fist against Itachi’s lips and inhales so deeply Itachi can feel the expansion of blanket and body. Exhales. Inhales deep like before, when he was asleep, and then Sasuke _s_ _hrieks_.

  
  


.x.

Itachi is perfect.

He is the perfect son, the perfect ninja, the perfect brother, and in the future he will be the perfect father and the perfect husband because he knows in what order those should occur.

Kakashi exhales through his nose in a derisive snort. “Of course you’re perfect. Didn’t you know?”

Itachi elects to clean the flaking blood from his shuriken instead of answering the other nin. It’s his first mission in his new assignment, he wants to do this right, and that means complete attention.

“You’re the youngest to ever graduate from the academy in peace times,” Kakashi continues, his tone indicating he’s entirely aware Itachi had been told as much, much too often before.

“You’re the prodigious son of the prodigious clan to which you also just happen to be next in line for the patriarchal seat.”

Itachi ignores Kakashi by cleaning the blood from his katana blade, next.

Kakashi is, of course, undeterred. “You’re Uchiha. Pride of the Leaf. Don’t get me wrong, you’re no Hokage.”

Kakashi is speaking into his cloth mask. He’s caught his ANBU mask under the chin by his ring finger so it dangles, ears pointed at the ground. Kakashi’s mask is the only part of his uniform he’s taken off so far, but all that blood was probably going to set anyway. Some of it’s even Kakashi’s. His face is sick pale, system shock and blood loss pale, in the (few) places his mask and hair and headband leave bare, but he just keeps sitting there, talking to Itachi.

“When your father finally croaks,” Kakashi recites, like an invocation, “when you finally come of age, this village is yours.”

Itachi re-sheaths his knife, checks his mask for damage.

“Everyone knows,” Kakashi tells him, head bowed. “Shisui knows,” Kakashi contends, tilting his chin toward the shinobi.

Shisui is currently not wearing pants. Just his chest armour as he sits, bandaging a half-healed hole in his calf.

“Don’t you, Shisui?” Kakashi badgers.

Shisui grimaces. “Fuck off, Kakashi. Leave the kid alone,” Shisui tells him off, looking at his own torn muscles the whole time. Still without looking up, he says to Itachi, “It’s getting pretty late, huh?”

Itachi leaves in the un-cleaned clothes from his mission, so when he arrives at home, he sneaks in through his bedroom window. The moon is waning toward new, and Itachi’s window anyway faces the wrong direction, so his room is dark. Still, he can see Sasuke curled up in the middle of his bed. His brother is awake, but only barely, face turned into the dark covers he lies on top of. He doesn’t have his stuffed dinosaur.

Itachi kneels at the edge of his own bed and whispers, “Sasuke, you should sleep.”

“I’m not tired,” Sasuke slurs, and pushes himself up to his hands and knees. He’s entirely too far gone to remember if Itachi is home early or late. “I was waiting.”

Itachi says, “At least get in the bed properly.”

“I’m not sleepy,” Sasuke insists again, his thin arms locked with all the stubbornness of a five-year old. “I told you, I was waiting.”

Itachi replies, “I am back now.”

Sasuke reaches out for him, and Itachi grabs his wrist, stopping him. “I’m bloody,” Itachi explains.

“And you stink,” Sasuke agrees, nose wrinkling.

“Then let me wash,” Itachi suggests. He drops Sasuke’s hand and starts to stand, but Sasuke lunges, capturing Itachi’s wrist this time, and tugs.

“No, no, you just got back,” Sasuke hisses, eyes wide in the dark despite his lethargy. “You can’t leave again already.”

“Just to the bathroom,” Itachi tells him.

Sasuke clambers up to the edge of the bed and hops down beside him, one hand still clenched tight around Itachi’s wrist.

“Just the bathroom,” Sasuke commands, expression tight.

They tiptoe down the hall, past their parents’ bedroom. In the bathroom, Itachi navigates Sasuke to a small square of the floor because he doesn’t want to turn on the light, and says, “Sit right here.”

“It’s dark,” Sasuke complains, but he sits and doesn’t move.

“My clothes are very messy.” Itachi starts to pull off his armour and set it in a pile near the bathtub.

“Are you hurt?” Sasuke asks, worry bright.

“I’m not hurt,” Itachi denies.

Sasuke yawns and tries to hide it seven times while Itachi cleans away the dirt and blood and gets dressed again in sleeping clothes. When he’s done setting weapons in his pajamas, he lifts Sasuke up by the armpits.

“You really should sleep,” Itachi chides his baby brother as Sasuke wraps arms and legs around his torso. “If you want to be a good ninja one day, you need lots of rest. Being a good ninja is hard work.”

Sasuke sticks his nose in the space between Itachi’s neck and Itachi’s shoulder. “You’ll help me.”

“We will help each other,” Itachi corrects him, and carries Sasuke chest to chest back to his room.


	2. Interlude

“Brother? Are you going to marry Aiko-san?”

The question startles Itachi enough that he stops drying the plate Sasuke has just handed him before he answers. His gaze slips down and to the right so that he can gauge the expression on Sasuke’s face. Serious eyes stare back at him. 

“Why would I do something like that?” Itachi asks.

Sasuke opens his mouth, but before he can speak, Itachi’s hand is shutting his jaw and nudging his head back to the shared chore. Obediently,  Sasuke dives back into the soapy water. 

As his hand connects with a glass, Sasuke says, “Well… you spend a lot of time with her, so you must like her, right?” 

“Not at all. Work,” Itachi reminds Sasuke when he gapes, dinner dishes once again forgotten. 

There’s an interlude of silence, where they finish the majority of the dishes, and had Sasuke been anyone but Sasuke, Itachi would have determined the conversation over.

“Why?” Sasuke asks.

“Mother and Father believed it a good relationship to encourage.” Itachi smiles, because he knows that is not the answer his little brother wants even before Sasuke’s face twists up into a scowl whose message of displeasure is superseded by an objectively overwhelming attribute of _adorable_.

“That’s not what I meant,” Sasuke complains, knowing Itachi knows that already. “Why don’t you like her?”

“Why should I?” Itachi asks back.

“She’s nice,” is Sasuke’s immediate answer. 

“And pretty, too, right?”

Sasuke, of course, misses the barely there irritation, so Itachi doesn’t feel quite so bad about mocking him. Sasuke’s oblivious to the anger he’d  have  fel t if Sasuke had said yes, after all.

Sasuke shrugs. “ Y eah, I guess she’s ok. But that’s not…I mean, she’s really nice.” 

And then Sasuke launches full-tilt into an advocating pitch Itachi is frankly a bit surprised wasn’t specifically enginered by a third-party. 

“She has a sister and two brothers at the academy,” Sasuke says, “and she always makes them lunch, and she walks them to school and home even though she’s not a ninja and they live, like, on the other side of the village, don’t they? And—”

“You want me to walk you to school?” Itachi asks.

“— _her_ birthday, every, every year—What?” Sasuke stops both talking and working to stare at Itachi. 

“Do you want me to fix your lunch every day?”

Sasuke fidgets under his brother’s carefully blank gaze. “ Um —no, that’s not what I… OK. Y eah, Aiko-san is really nice  to do that, it has to take a long time, right? So— ”

“That would be a nice thing to do, right?”

“You _are_ nice!” Sasuke answers in dispute. “You’re just…busy.” Sasuke’s voice starts to rise as, inspired, now, with a clear direction for his argument, he picks up steam. “You’re not always around, because you’re working! You’re important, Itachi, you’re like – you’re a _super_ ninja, right?  But, um—when you are back, all the time when you’re back, you’re here. And that’s all that matters. To me, I mean. I mean, your work is important, too? But when you’re here, it means you care, so.” Sasuke finishes meekly, face flushed, “Yeah. That’s all that’s important.” 

Sasuke frowns down at the serving spoon he holds, and though Itachi thinks he’s scrubbing at it a bit more forcefully than necessary, he doesn’t say anything in reprimand. 

Eventually they finish.

“Bedtime, brother,” Itachi says by way of apology, and wipes the suds sticking to Sasuke’s right cheek away in a gentle, affectionate brush.

Sasuke  smiles brighter than all the lanterns in the street . He  leaps down from his stool and  takes off running for his bedroom, dragging Itachi behind him  by the hand. “Good-night!”  Sasuke leaves in  their wake.

“Know what?” he demands back in his room, but muffled since he’s slipping his shirt off while he’s saying it. “When I –”

Off come the slacks.

”—grow up—” 

His shirt and pants go flying toward the  clothes hamper by the door 

“— _I’m_ —”

Itachi nudges the  clothes hamper  under  Sasuke’s sailing things half a second before they hit the floor.

”—going to marry a really nice girl.” 

Sasuke’s mouth is still stretched wide and sharp into his cheeks, but now he stands in  his underwear , his nightshirt balled in his hands. He’s pausing to catch his breath and trying to pretend he doesn’t look like he’s waiting for his brother’s acknowledgement or approval (even if he wants it) because at the ripe age of seven, Sasuke knows it’s not going to happen. 

“...All that matters is that she’s nice?” Itachi asks.

“Huh?” Sasuke blinks and flushes. “…Well, I guess I want her to be kind of pretty.”

“Like Mother?” 

Sasuke frowns. “No one’s as pretty as mother, brother.”

“I suppose not,” Itachi admits. “Teeth.”

Hiding his smile behind his shirt as he  j ams it over his head, Sasuke scrambles blindly for the door in  compliance. He yelps, surprised, when Itachi’s hand to his chest stops him dead in his tracks. Itachi untangles the cloth from Sasuke’s limbs until it falls the way it is supposed to,  puffy  red and blue clouds that hang to Sasuke’s knobby knees, thin  cotton for the beginning of summer. 

“You always take care of me, brother, ” Sasuke declares approvingly. He sounds entirely pleased with himself. 

Not entirely teasing,  Itachi tells him,“That is something else you will have to look for in a wife. I can’t take care of you forever.”

Sasuke’s response is predictably dramatic, body freezing in a way he will only hope of trying to reproduce through training in years to come. 

“You won’t?” his little brother asks, disbelieving, artificially small in his draping attire. 

And Itachi knows this, the trick behind this illusion which isn’t even intentional yet, but it does nothing to dampen the immediate lurch in his chest.

Itachi holds his tongue until the feeling has ebbed. Then he says, “No,” and backs out in the hall, and Sasuke follows as if Itachi has physically pulled him. “I suppose I will.”

A moment as Sasuke reassures himself silently—not privately, the words scroll over his face, smoothing his brow, releasing the pinched corners of his mouth—that yes, this is what Itachi has said.  His brother’s  safeguard remains unthreatened.

Meanwhile Itachi backs all the way down the hall into the bathroom and Sasuke follows.

When Sasuke starts smiling again, Itachi quickly warns, “And you will have to pay close attention so that you will know what to do when it is your turn.”

“My turn to what?” Sasuke is trying to be petulant. It’s not working. He’s too relieved.

“To take care of others.”

Sasuke lowers his gaze to the floor so that Itachi can’t see he wouldn’t care what Itachi told him as long it wasn’t a retraction of his promise and tries to focus. Slowly, as Itachi waits, Sasuke’s attention turns. He thinks about it; he snags the edge of Itachi’s pants in a fist. When he looks at Itachi again, his eyebrows have re-knotted, the bridge of his nose scrunched. 

“Itachi, you don’t need me to care of you.” Sasuke doesn’t look as if he’s sure if he’s making a statement or asking a question. “But who else—who are the others?”

“Your teammates, for one,” Itachi tells him matter-of-factly. “Your children.”

“Itachi,” Sasuke protests, second heir appropriate, “I’m seven, that’s not for forever!”


	3. Sleeping in (Were Dreaming)

  
  


.x.

Shisui groans, “I fucking hate this clan,” and curls into himself further, arms around his torso. His back is bent entirely in half. He has his knees and his head pressed into the dirt under the dock.

Itachi is sitting beside him. It’s not quite summer yet, but the weather today is beautiful. Almost warm, blue sky. There are no clouds, and the sun makes the world beyond the dock’s shadow bright.

If Shisui is crying, Itachi can’t hear it over the waves in the lake. Itachi leans forward and puts his hand on Shisui’s neck. He strokes the top of Shisui’s spine. Shisui is very still.

“Are you sure?” Itachi asks softly.

“Yes,” Shisui hisses, definitive, “yes, I’m sure,” and Itachi exhales, low, long breath that sweeps across Shisui’s shoulders.

He isn’t sure what he’s doing. Shisui is so much older than Itachi, but so much younger than the next oldest relative, too. It’s that way for many of the clan, years and years between cousins, siblings, parents.

Itachi has figured out the generation gap in his clan. They don’t all survive. Between the academy and the police force and the ANBU, none of them could ever possibly be that lucky. The clan has been, _is_ thorough.

Itachi is angry, so angry, and he can feel it all the time. He’s tired of being angry.

Itachi says calmly, unquetionably validating, “All right,” and keeps stroking Shisui’s neck, “you hate the clan.” With the same level tone, Itachi demands, “What will you do about it?”

Beyond the little hill down to the dock, coming from the compound’s main gate, Sasuke is calling, “Brother!”

Shisui starts laughing. “I’m going to kill them,” he declares through his bubbling laughs, “kill all of them.”

Shisui doesn’t laugh like a hysterical man.

“High ambition,” Itachi murmurs, eyes on Shisui’s back, but his attention has already moved beyond the hill. “Will this be before or after my birthday?”

Finally, his cousin sits up, tilting his head to the side in a way that twists Itachi’s grip awkwardly, but Itachi doesn’t withdraw his hand. Shisui’s eyes are bright red. His lips curve up unevenly in his gentle smile.

“I planned something really special for you this year.” Shisui promises, “No blood until after.”

Itachi sweeps his thumb in a circle around the knot of a vertebra. He doesn’t reply.

Shisui eyelids lower but don’t close, and he mutters, “Your brother is coming.”

Itachi has gotten older, grown up a lot. He doesn’t think Shisui is a particularly good ninja anymore—Shisui is only highly skilled where Itachi is exceptional, he can see all five of the kunai Shisui has hidden on his person right now—but he doesn’t have to be: Sasuke is loudly obvious and coming closer.

Shisui sighs. “It’s getting late, little cousin.”

Shisui has gotten bigger than the days he had to drag Obito and Itachi home from the training fields; his shoulders are wide under Itachi’s arm, and the expanse of his back is intimidating. But Itachi has gotten bigger, too. Soon he will surpass Shisui. For now, though, he can still hear the echoes. He listens to them.

They aren’t as loud as Sasuke’s sure feet.

“Brother!”

“You didn’t,” Itachi says firmly, hand tightening around Shisui’s neck as Shisui moves to get up, “say good-bye.”

“OK,” Shisui starts laughing again and leans close, “I’m sorry.” He drops his forehead onto Itachi’s shoulder. “Good-bye, Itachi.”

Itachi leaves Shisui under the deck at the edge of the lake’s low-tide.

“Brother!” Sasuke yells again, even though Itachi is close enough to see, now. He keeps running, doesn’t even slow down, and slams full-bodied into Itachi’s hips.

“Careful,” Itachi tells him, but he’s already wrapping his arm around Sasuke’s back, so there’s a good chance Sasuke will ignore him.

“I called you, and you didn’t answer,” Sasuke accuses, then immediately goes stiff and pulls away. “I mean—”

“You’ve found me.”

Sasuke nods.

“Well?” He tugs at a lock of Sasuke’s stubborn hair.

Sasuke relaxes again. “I got my test back,” he announces, finally subsiding into a less restraining embrace. He surrenders one of Itachi’s arms back to him, only wraps around one and stays off to his side so they can both keep walking. “I did the best in the class. I’ll be ready for the academy this year for sure, don’t you think?”

Itachi bows his head so Sasuke can see his expression, can see Itachi is not merely repeating rhetoric. “Whether or not you get into the academy depends on more than just your demonstrated intellect,” he reminds him.

Sasuke huffs, fully indignant as usual on the subject. “I don’t see why _I_ can’t go when they’ll let in people who can’t even read.”

“The academy teaches many skills necessary to being a ninja. Intelligence. Endurance. Discipline.” Itachi swings his arm back a little so Sasuke will start paying attention again. “Anyone who enters the academy does so when it is their time to begin learning these things.”

“But I’m ready now,” Sasuke argues. “Unless you’re saying I should stop studying and start causing trouble to everyone in the entire village.”

“Please don’t.”

Sasuke grins. “I should start with the clan.”

  
  


.x.

  
  


Itachi doesn’t know he has a plan until after Shisui is dead and he finds himself setting his plan into action.

He goes to Akatsuki because last year a member of the clan had his right eye ripped out cutting through River Country on his way back from Wind. Itachi doesn’t know who—he can remember names and every twist of the furthest family branch, but in all likelihood he never met the man—and he doesn’t particularly care.

That man hadn’t been the first. There’d been three mysterious attacks Itachi could recall first-hand while other Uchiha had been out and about, two right in the village before Itachi was born. The clan kept extensive records on all things, but especially this. Down to the day and hour.

So had the Third Hokage.

What Itachi didn’t know was that Akatsuki worked in pairs.

“What,” Kisame roars, and then he coughs so hard Itachi wonders if he’ll stop again, “what the fuck are you doing?”

Itachi slices the tendons in the last ambusher’s legs, and she crumples on the ground, face grey.

“If you got away—” Kisame tries to stem the blood pouring from his mouth with a swipe of his hand and only ends up smearing the blood welling up from from his skinned hand across his cheeks. The transposed blood begins to slide down the angled curve of his jaw. “Why the fuck did you come back?”

Itachi helps Kisame back up to his feet, then swings the mammoth sword onto Kisame’s back. He can’t carry it himself, he’s already using his undislocated shoulder to support Kisame.

“Can you walk with me?” Itachi asks.

Kisame splutters. “You’re not even going to kill them?”

Kisame twists about, counting up the thirty-seven bodies splayed in a semi-circle around them. Some of them are staring, faces bent in hate, limbs bent painfully across the uneven terrain.

Itachi stares back. “Unnecessary.”

Kisame bellows laughter. Itachi wishes he would stop; it makes it difficult to balance.

“Who the fuck told you you could do whatever you want?” Kisame demands. His breathing is heavy.

Itachi responds, “My clan.”

They just hadn’t mentioned that everything always led to something else. Itachi had had to figure that out on his own.

Kisame stamps his foot on one of the ambushing nin as they pass, crushing his ribs. Then he crushes the man’s porcelain mask. The man doesn’t react, he was already unconscious.

“And you believed them?” Kisame asks.

“It’s worked so far.”

By the time they make it back to base, Itachi has reset his arm and Kisame is more blue than red and walking on his own again. There’s a boy on the front steps when they arrive, auburn-haired head bowed. He’s playing with marbles. He moves wrong.

“Sasori,” Kisame growls, “get your freaky guard-dog out of the fucking way. We’re injured.”

The boy’s head swivels over his shoulders to look at them. His eyes are dark green.

“Pathetic,” the boy sneers in a high-pitched voice.

Kisame slams his sword on the boy’s head. It pops off and rolls, the rest of the body having slithered up out of the way. The boy blinks at them from the bottom of the steps while his body crouches at the top, flexing its fingers.

“It will take considerable time to fix that,” Sasori’s voice says from the boy’s mouth.

Kisame dodges around the poison darts the head tries to stick in him as he passes. The body lets him through the door without any more trouble than a shuriken that opens a new wound under the last of his gills.

“He asked nicely,” Itachi says, “for Kisame.”

He steps quickly into the foyer after his partner

There’s a small army of spiders on the floor. Their wooden joints click as they surge off the floor and up the wall, positioning themselves over the pair’s heads.

Kisame starts coughing again. “Where’s the Snake Fucker?” he manages to ask through the gurgling sounds in his chest.

“He left,” the spiders all rasp together.

Kisame snorts, “Yeah,” and he plucks a dawdling spider from the wall and crushes it between his fingers where it leaves a fine, silver powder. “And where are you?”

“Busy,” the spiders answer again. “Out.” The door behind Kisame and Itachi swings close. The door to the kitchen swings open.

Kisame drags his sword along the floor, deliberately gouging the hardwood. The floorboards squirm in protest. “Aw,” Kisame coos, “did you leave us dinner?”

“There are bandages in the cabinet,” the spiders tell him. “That contact poison won’t kill you with some jasmine tea.”

Itachi leaves Kisame to bicker and goes to his room.

  
  


.x.

  
  


Sasori gets a new partner quickly, and then it is years before Akatsuki gains a new member.

He says his name is Tobi. He says, “Itachi-kun!” whenever Itachi is in hearing distance, and then asks, “How’s it going?” and says, “You’re so cool, Itachi-kun,” and complains, “Kisame’s not good enough for you,” and gushes, “You were so brave!” and otherwise generally rhapsodizes Itachi’s many (many) good qualities.

Itachi tries very hard to stay out of Tobi’s presence. But it’s difficult to avoid him.

Tobi is one man too many for Akatsuki’s general arrangement. He’s an odd-man out.

  
  


He does not seem to care.

Mostly, Tobi hangs around a base, glutting himself on food and the tidbits of information the others will pass along. Akatsuki’s range is wide, but they’re few in number and spread thin across the continent. Itachi goes months without seeing any members in the flesh except for Kisame, because they are partners, and Tobi, because the man refuses to wander anywhere west of Konoha unless it is with Sasori and Deidara. And anywhere except west of Konoha, conveniently, is Itachi’s and Kisame’s main theatre of operation the whole three years their target is training with the Legendary Sannin.

“Why Deidara?” Kisame harrumphs as they sit around the kotatsu. The base on the far shore of Lightning Country is badly insulated, and one of the name-giving storms has been pacing the coast for days.

Tobi is playing with his fingers. Not twirling them or tapping them together nervously, he’s on the floor, lower body ensconced under the blue-bells adorning the comforter, twisting his fingers around and between and through themselves.

Tobi rolls his head along the floor, black hair fanning out as he turns to look at Kisame. “Hm?” he hums.

“Why,” Kisame repeats, shark teeth slotted into each other, “Deidara? You think Itachi’s so great, why do you trail after Bottled Blond whenever Short and Dark gives you the cold shoulder?” He sounds put out and offended, which means he’s feeling put out and offended.

Itachi doesn’t react to the ‘Short and Dark.’ Everyone is short, compared to Kisame, and while there’d been Uchiha without black hair and brown eyes, Itachi’s own genes are not light.

Tobi twists away from Kisame with an annoyed, childish grunt. Itachi imagines that behind his mask, Tobi is pouting, like Sasuke when someone tells him ‘no’, and then he doesn’t.

“Not Deidara,” Tobi replies regally, just as put upon as Kisame. “Sasori.”

“Fine. Sasori. Why?” Kisame’s jaw is beginning to twitch. Whether it because he wants to get up and skewer things (Tobi) or because he wants to smile, Itachi doesn’t know.

Tobi sighs impatiently and throws his arms wide. The bolts down his arm clunk heavily against the cement which is beneath the thin lavender carpet.

Tobi whines “Because,” stretching the word out across his chest, “Sasori lost his partner, yeah? So he’s next.”

Itachi does not tell Tobi that Kisame completely fails to see his logic.

Kisame takes care of it himself. “What? What does that—”

“He’s no good,” Tobi finally condescends to explain, though he rolls to his side, presenting his back to Kisame as he talks. “He lost his partner, no good ninja.” Tobi huffs noisily, then springs up, throws himself on top of the kotatsu and singsongs, “And he’s next, and then Tobi will be Deidara’s partner, and he’ll be real Akatsuki.”

Kisame rolls his eyes and snorts. His gills flutter. “Sasori didn’t lose Orochimaru, Snake Fucker left.”

Tobi isn’t paying him any attention. “Itachi-kun,” he’s saying, bright orange mask tilted up imploringly at Itachi, “I’ll be good Akatsuki. Don’t you think?”

Itachi pulls his tea cup to himself and gets up to leave.

“Nya, Itachi-kun.” Tobi’s voice suddenly calms, levels out to something appropriate to Tobi’s big hands and big shoulders. “Don’t leave. Just—you’re a good ninja. I want your opinion.”

Itachi doesn’t run. Not even almost.

  
  


.x.

  
  


“You fucking bastard,” is what wakes Itachi up, and Itachi wants to go right back to sleep.

Everything hurts. That’s not new, everything has been hurting for years. What is new is the growling voice over his head, cursing his name and his teachers and his lineage and his nail polish.

The voice doesn’t get to curse anything else. Itachi is sure it would have continued (his nail polish? Yes, the top coat’s a paralyzing agent, and the middle coat is straight poison, and the bottom coat Itachi doesn’t apply in closed spaces, but most people who found that out didn’t live long enough to complain) except the voice suddenly starts fading and then it entirely vanishes.

Its owner has been dragged away, Itachi supposes.

That still leaves five people situated around Itachi’s body. Itachi’s not entirely sure what constitutes his body, right now. He can’t feel anything. He can’t open his eyes. He can smell. Itachi and his captors are inside Konoha.

With the cursing voice gone, everything is quiet.

The last thing Itachi remembers is Sasuke, drenched in the rain, eyes bleeding. His left hand had been in Itachi’s chest. That’s ok, Sasuke had deserved that.

He hadn’t deserved Itachi’s hand through his stomach in kind, but after, when Sasuke’s momentum had forced them both to the ground and Itachi felt the blood starting to inch out through the burned flesh between his lungs, Sasuke had been so close. It was the closest Itachi had been to his baby brother in years.

Sasuke’s eyes were still his dominant feature, though now for being red in all that drained white and not for being half his face. Sasuke had swallowed, the knobby bone in his throat plunging ( _he grew, he really, really grew—)_ , and Itachi, who still had his own Sharingan activated, had seen the first vowel opening on Sasuke’s lips. Had seen Sasuke’s open mouth sliding closed around the second sound. So he’d struck.

The ninja escorting Itachi’s body smell like dirt and the trees and someone’s drying laundry. Like proper shinobi should. There’s nothing unique or distinctive about any of them. Itachi only knows there are five of them because it’s the most strategic formation for an escort team, one person to every limb and his head. Itachi doesn’t know whether or not he is still in one piece, but he doesn’t know any different, either.

He can only tell when they start going up because the air gets thinner. It’s not a drastic change; they don’t climb very high.

Kisame is dead, he thinks. Probably dead.

His escorts finally stop moving. Itachi tries to open his eyes again, and this time he succeeds. It’s stupid, alerting your captors you’re conscious when you have no immediate means of escape and haven’t gathered enough information to make escape any more immediate, which would matter, if escaping were Itachi’s goal, here.

Itachi’s field of vision is taken up by a blond woman. She stares at him, brown eyes steady. She’s not afraid of his Mangekyou, which means she’s confident he can’t use it, so revisiting that whole state-of-his-body thing, actually, maybe Itachi is nothing more than a severed head. A trophy. In which case, he is only surprised he is still conscious enough to _be_ surprised.

( _Good ninja ne—)_

“Uchiha Itachi,” the woman says. “Caught you at last.” She doesn’t sound very happy about it.

She sighs, deep breath in first and a long, slow exhale. Her eyes close (a mistake) and then she commands, “Status.”

One of his escorts answers, “Everyone’s accounted for. The mission went awry two weeks ago. We were pursuing Uchiha as instructed—”

“Whole damn day behind.” The cursing voice is back. It still sounds angry, but less frantic now.

The woman has apparently forgotten that Itachi is watching. She jerks her head around and snaps at the voice over Itachi’s head, “Don’t interrupt.”

“But they were,” the interloper protests.

They had been. Itachi had waited, watching them pursue his brother pursuing him, for five days.

When Sasuke had fallen forward, his blood and tissue and severed muscle s sliding down Itachi’s half buried arm, Itachi hadn’t been sure they would make it in time.

“Fine, don’t listen to me. _N_ _o one_ listen to me, Sasuke can just die—”

Chaos erupts.

Itachi’s escorts are angry. They’re shouting _we_ _have_ _spent years caught in the middle of your drama._ They are complaining of having been in the crossfire –

(as if that weren’t the job they’d signed up to)

They are accusing the cursing, angry voice of treating them as if they were completely inconsequential

(—actually, Itachi definitely recognizes that voice, and that means—)

They are venomous in their castigation, _you got what you wanted and we helped you get it, now you don’t care?_

( — don’t they know they’re poking the fucking Kyuubi?)

From the uproar, Itachi gleans five names. Chouji. Shikamaru. Neji. Hinata. Sakura.

He doesn’t need anyone to tell him the name of the screaming voice that rises, finally, over all of them. “I never _asked_ you, I told you no, y ou’re the ones — and we could have been, _I_ could have— _H_ _e won’t even wake up_.”

“But he did.” Everyone else goes silent. “Sasuke woke up yesterday.”

It stays quiet after that.

  
  


.x.

  
  


Months in Konoha prisons are meant to feel like years.

  
  


.x.

  
  


The brand new Sixth Hokage —official as of the morning of Itachi’s trial—sentences Itachi to living with his little brother’s family.

His little brother’s family includes a four-year old boy who does not like baths.

“No!” the boy screeches, and Itachi, still several paces down the hall from the closed bathroom door, feels the sound all the way down his spine.

Sasuke’s answering appeals aren’t as loud, but Itachi, even with his chakra forcibly diverted and pulled from his body at all hours, is not a ninja for nothing.

“Please, just…” Sasuke pleads, twists his son’s name from his throat with great agony, “I’m here, you’re ok.”

“No, no, no,” the little boy chants, but each ‘no,’ gets a little softer.

Itachi reaches the door.

“No!” His nephew’s voice rises sharply again, punctuated by the flat slap of a hand hitting water. The little boy begins to wail.

“Damn it, why,” Sasuke curses, “are you —stop crying, I’ve got you, ok?”

Itachi opens the door just as Sasuke lifts his flailing son off the little plastic stool set beside the bathtub and onto his lap. Sasuke’s son throws his arms wide, tiny fingers scrambling for purchase against Sasuke’s bare chest, and Sasuke braces him with one arm across his back, shifts his body between his son’s and the door, and turns his head so he can see Itachi. Sasuke’s eyes are dark. His entire expression is.

“What do you want?” Sasuke asks quietly.

The little boy’s crying is breaking up around fluttery hiccoughs. All Itachi can see of him around his little’s brother’s body is a foot on Sasuke’s black pants.

Sasuke’s eyes narrow fractionally. Itachi has been staring without speaking.

“Are you going to make dinner?” Itachi says.

Sasuke doesn’t blink. “What time is it?” A hand appears suddenly around the arm Sasuke is bracing himself with against the floor. Sasuke’s skin is lighter than his son’s.

Itachi says, “It’s almost 7:00.”

The hiccoughing slows down. The little boy has moved on to too fast, too shallow breaths.

The frown Sasuke throws Itachi is not for Itachi, for once. “All right. I’ll do it after this.”

“I could do it,” Itachi suggests, and Sasuke, who is reaching for the soap while his son finally starts moving in ways that don’t have to do with escape again, pauses with his hand in mid-air.

Sasuke still doesn’t blink, though. “No. I’ll get it in done time. Especially,” he says, and there’s a tick right on the edge of his hairline not quite hidden by his bangs, “if that idiot is too stupid to take a team that’s only been gone for two weeks at their word and let them go.”

There’s a reason most ninja outside of the large clans don’t marry other ninja; there has to be someone completely devoted to the child’s upbringing, just in case. Add in a bloodline limit, and it becomes more important.

Sasuke didn’t marry another ninja, he just had a child with one because he is stubborn even now, fifteen years out from the child curled in Itachi’s bed refusing sleep. He’d put his name back on the active duty roster the same hour the medics had stopped demanding it be removed.

Itachi finally escapes scrutiny as Sasuke diverts part of his attention to his son. The boy, now completely silent, is sliding out of Sasuke’s arms to lean over the tub. He splashes his hands in the water.

Itachi leaves Sasuke and his son in the bathroom and goes to the kitchen.

Itachi chops the vegetables lined up on the counter, cleans the fish Sasuke has laid out, fries them all on the stove.

When Sasuke enters the room carrying his son, both of them dressed in shirts and pants again, Itachi is sitting in the dining chair nearest the hall. The dining table Sasuke has in the kitchen isn’t traditional. The legs hold the table top three feet off the ground, and the chairs rise to meet it. Itachi is sitting with one leg crossed over the other, one hand in his lap, one hand spread palm down on the smooth wood. The wood is growing warm with the air in the room.

Sasuke arranges his son in the chair closest to the oven and scowls at his brother over the little boy’s hair.

“I said I would do it,” Sasuke says. His eyes are still dark. Itachi hasn’t seen the Sharingan since they tried to kill each other.

“I didn’t poison them.”

“I didn’t say you did,” Sasuke replies, but now he looks suspicious.

The little boy glances at Itachi while Sasuke hovers over his head. Then he stares at his dad, and keeps staring as Sasuke moves between the oven and the cabinets, checking the rice and gathering dishes. He doesn’t say anything.

Sasuke’s son’s eyes are grey, and Itachi can’t imagine them red.

Sasuke finishes up the rest of the meal and then sets the table, fish and rice and vegetables and a ceramic yellow pot of tea. The whole time, his eyes are either on Itachi or his son.

“Do not,” Sasuke commands as he sets a pair of a chopsticks and a spoon down beside his son’s empty plate, “begin until everyone is here.”

The little boy’s hands don’t move. “Until Sakura gets here?”

“Yes, Sakura, too.”

Sasuke’s son turns to Itachi. “Why are you here?” he asks, all perfect enunciation as if he hadn’t been non-verbal thirty minutes prior, screaming in terror.

Itachi glances at Sasuke, looking for some clue as to what Sasuke wants him to say, but Sasuke’s expression is closed.

“I was told,” Itachi says finally, “dinner was at 7:15. I didn’t want to be late.”

Sasuke’s son says, “Everyone else is,” but even as the words leave his mouth, they can all hear the front door swinging open.


End file.
